Managing overall role capabilities can be done by an administrator using Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles. This is the place to add custom roles or modify existing roles. The "Manage roles" tab, allows the system administrator to edit any one of over 350 different capabilities associated with any role. The "Allow role assignments", "Allow role overrides" and "Allow role switches" contain a matrix which give the ability for a specific role to work with other specific roles.

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Manage roles

The 'Manage roles' tab contains a list of roles on your site. The edit column contains icons for editing, deleting roles and copying roles, and for moving them up or down in the list (affecting the way that roles are listed around Moodle).

Note that if you have students who have been given extra permissions at course and/or activity levels (such as forum ratings), then they will no longer be able to do this once the role has been reset to its default. A teacher would need to go back and set up these extra permissions in the course/activity levels again.

Allow role assignments

The "Allow role assignments" tab allows (or does not allow) a specific role to be able to assign specific roles to a user.

Enabling teachers to assign other teachers

By default, teachers can only assign other users the roles of non-editing teachers, students and guests. If you want teachers to be able to assign other teachers in their course, you can allow the role assignment:

Allow role overrides

The "Allow role overrides" tab allows (or does not allow) a specific role to be able to override specific roles for a user. For example, it might allow a teacher role to override a student's role to a non-editing teacher's role.

Allow role switches

The "Allow role switches" tab allows (or does not allow) a specific role to be able to temporarily change their role to another specific role. For example, this might allow a users assigned to a custom role in a course to see "Student" in the Settings > Switch role list.

Note: the selected role must also have the moodle/role:switchroles capability to be able to switch.